Equipment Setup

Equipment represents the machines and workstations in your shop -- CNC mills, lathes, welding stations, saws, press brakes, and so on. Adding equipment lets you assign work orders to specific machines and see your shop floor laid out on the production board.

Getting There

Go to Settings > Processes & Equipment and click the Equipment tab.

Adding Equipment

Equipment is created from within a manufacturing process. This is because each piece of equipment has rates (cost per hour, markup, selling rate) that are specific to the process it performs.

  1. Go to Settings > Processes & Equipment.
  2. On the Processes tab, find the process you want to add equipment to (e.g., "CNC Milling").
  3. Click Add Equipment at the bottom of that process card.
  4. Choose Create New to add a new machine, or Select Existing to link a machine that already exists in another process.
  5. If creating new, enter:
    • Name -- what you call this machine (e.g., "Haas VF-2", "Manual Lathe").
    • Color -- a color for the machine's avatar, used on the production board to visually distinguish equipment.
    • Lights-out capable -- check this if the machine can run unattended (used for scheduling).
  6. Set the hourly rates for this equipment on this process (see below).
  7. Click Save Equipment.

Equipment Rates

Each equipment-process combination has three rate phases:

  • Programming -- time spent writing or setting up the CNC program.
  • Setup -- time spent fixturing, tooling, and preparing the machine for a run.
  • Cycle -- the per-unit machining time (time per part).

For each phase, you set:

| Field | Description | |-------|-------------| | Cost/hr | Your internal cost for this type of work (what it costs you). | | Markup % | The percentage markup over cost. | | Rate/hr | The selling rate, calculated automatically from cost and markup. This is the rate used on quotes. |

When you add an operation to a quote part and select this process and equipment, Forge uses these rates to calculate the operation cost.

Tip: You can set different rates for the same machine across different processes. For example, a CNC mill might have one rate for milling and a different rate for drilling.

Viewing All Equipment

The Equipment tab shows all active equipment across your shop in a grid view. Each card displays:

  • The machine name and color avatar.
  • Which processes it's linked to.

This gives you a quick overview of your shop's capacity.

Archiving Equipment

If you retire a machine or no longer use it, you can archive it instead of deleting it:

  1. Go to the Equipment tab.
  2. Click the archive icon on the equipment card.
  3. Confirm the action.

Archiving removes the equipment from all linked processes and hides it from the production board. Archived equipment does not appear in dropdowns when creating new work orders.

Note: If the equipment is linked to processes, Forge warns you how many processes will be affected before archiving.

How Equipment Connects to Production

Once equipment is set up:

  • When you create work orders for a job, you assign each work order to a specific piece of equipment.
  • The production board displays columns for each piece of equipment, showing queued, in-progress, and completed work orders.
  • Shop floor managers use the production board to see what each machine is working on and drag work orders to reorder the queue.

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